Chapter 147 — The Long-Awaited...

"What kind of person she is, I don't know either right now." Yang Moyi said helplessly, "She never said a single word from beginning to end. I don't even know whether she came for you or for me. But one thing is certain: whoever is behind her is no simple matter."

Wang Yanqiu nodded slightly. Indeed, Yang Yanzhou was right. Just now she had let her concern cloud her judgment. Thinking back on it now, from the moment Yang Ce began fighting the black-clad woman until her suicide, the woman truly had not spoken a single word.

"Forget it. Let's not think about her anymore. Let's see if she's carrying anything that could identify her." With that, Yang Yanzhou crouched down and carefully searched the black-clad woman's body.

Unfortunately, all they found on her was a single dagger. It seemed she had been carrying three daggers on her person; beyond that, there was nothing else.

In the end, Yang Juehuan's gaze fell on the small bag behind the black-clad woman. He picked it up and first used his ability to look inside. No sooner had he looked than he got the shock of his life: the bag contained detonators.

"What is it?" Seeing Yang Ce's expression freeze, Wang Yanqiu asked, puzzled.

Yang Ce opened the small bag and pointed at its contents. "The two of us nearly went to hell together."

"Detonators?" Wang Yanqiu naturally recognized what was in the bag. Her expression changed at once. "You mean she came to plant detonators and blow us both up?"

"That's about the size of it." Yang Jincong smiled. "Looks like we dodged a bullet."

Wang Yanqiu fell silent. The person who had come today was no ordinary foe—at the very least, only an opponent of her own family's caliber could train a deathsworn like this.

Yang Ce gathered up the black-clad woman's corpse and sprinkled it with some of the Corpse-Dissolving Powder Fang Tian had given him. The body instantly turned into a wisp of green smoke and vanished.

"Corpse-Dissolving Powder?" Wang Yanqiu asked in surprise.

"Mm." Yang Yuting nodded.

Wang Yanqiu also knew there were all sorts of strange medicinal powders in the underworld, so she did not find it particularly odd. Since Yang Yongjin did not seem inclined to elaborate, she did not press further.

"Do you have any enemies?" Yang Ce thought for a moment, then asked.

Wang Yanqiu shook her head. She had been pondering this very question from the start, but no answer had come to her. It was possible her family had offended someone, but her own identity was a secret—almost no one knew, only a handful of close relatives. Wang Yanqiu could not make sense of it. Just who was this black-clad woman? "If you can't figure it out, then don't dwell on it. We'll meet force with force—if one comes, I'll kill one. I refuse to believe deathsworn are turned out like a production line, as many as you please." To put Wang Yanqiu at ease, Yang Ce said this with a careless smile.

Though Yang Yongjin knew how deathsworn were trained, he reasoned there could not be many of them. If there were, all they would have to do was send a whole team and gang up on him—he could not have held them off.

Indeed, Yang Ce's guess was not wrong. Training deathsworn was exceedingly complex and difficult. The boss had taken in ten orphans, and in the end only three had passed the training. One of them was Xiao Ai, and another was Xiao Zi, who was also the boss's bedmate. The third was a boy named Xiao La.

Of the other seven, some had died under the strain of the training, and the rest had developed minds of their own and betrayed him—the Boss had been forced to finish them off with his own hands.

Inside the van, the Boss and the young man waited for word from Xiao Ai, but a long, long time passed and she still did not return.

The Boss's expression began to tighten. Perhaps Xiao Ai had failed.

Those three were his trump cards; he did not want to play them lightly. If the young man's suggestion had not been so very tempting, the Boss would never have sent Xiao Ai out in person.

An hour later, the Boss sighed, a note of sorrow in it: "Xiao Ai would never take this long to come back."

"She failed." The young man felt no sympathy for Xiao Ai whatsoever. To him, she was a machine, a tool for carrying out missions.

"That would seem to be it." The Boss nodded regretfully and said with a melancholy air, "Let's go back. It seems Yang Ce is not so easy to kill after all."

To be continued

1039. The Jewelry Festival

"What if you're not here in the future?" Back in the room, Wang Yanqiu asked, still shaken.

She herself could not tell whether she truly wanted Yang Ce to stay and keep her company, or whether she was simply afraid that someone would come and plant a bomb here.

"Let's install a security system," Yang Ce said. "I'll have someone get in touch to have one custom-made. Though I imagine that after one failure, whoever is behind this won't try the same trick a second time."

There was some sense in what Yang Yanzhou said. Wang Yanqiu nodded. No one would be stupid enough to use the same method again after it had failed once.

"All right. That would set my mind at ease a little." Wang Yanqiu knew that a so-called security system was only meant for amateurs. But since Yang Ce said he would have someone custom-make it, it should not be shoddy—at the very least it could deal with the sort of men who had come tonight. Otherwise Yang Shuoxuan would not have proposed it.

"Go to sleep. It's very late. I don't think they'll send anyone else tonight." Yang Ce took Wang Yanqiu in his arms and spoke reassuringly.

"By the way, Yang Ce, you were really ruthless back there—a Vajra kick to the groin? You could actually bring yourself to do that?" Wang Yanqiu suddenly remembered what had happened and complained a little.

"If I hadn't been ruthless, she would have killed me," Yang Shuyu said. Sometimes one had to learn to be ruthless; otherwise, others would be ruthless to you.

"Then why didn't you use that move when you fought me back then?" Wang Yanqiu asked, half in reproach.

"That's obviously different," Yang Hengye said. "You said yourself that if you lost, you'd be my lover. If I'd kicked you somewhere that broke, wouldn't I be the one losing out?"

At Yang Ce's barely disguised teasing, Wang Yanqiu's face flushed at once. "So you're afraid of breaking it, are you?"

The annual Jewelry Festival was about to be held in Songjiang. This was a jewelry exhibition organized by the Huaxia Jewelry Association, and this year's venue was Songjiang.

By rights, Songjiang was a second-tier city, and exhibitions of this kind would not ordinarily choose such a place. But this time it was an exception; no one knew why the association had chosen it.

Lin Yanhe was not in Songjiang—it was Zhao Sisi who had called to tell him. Although Liu Yan Jewelry was a brand newly established this year, it had the Liu Yan name behind it, the endorsement of Shu Ya, an idol singer famous throughout Asia, and had recently launched a do-it-yourself wedding-ring service. Liu Yan Jewelry was therefore as hot as hot could be, and an invitation had naturally been sent over.

"Getting the Jewelry Festival held in Songjiang this time really cost me a great deal of effort," the Boss said mildly. "That vice chairman is a greedy one—he took a ten-million bribe from me all by himself."

"But that ten million will come back soon enough, won't it?" the young man said with a smile. "And it will make Yang Ce lose far more—bankruptcy, even."

"I hope this time I get to see Yang Ce reduced to poverty and ruin." The Boss gave a cold laugh. "You're right. When dealing with Yang Ce, you don't have to kill him right away. Stripping him of everything works better than killing him."

"Everything for the next stage is arranged properly, I trust?" the young man asked.